The World According to Narnia

Christian Meaning in C. S. Lewis' Beloved Chronicles

By: Jonathan Rogers

Narrated by: Brian Emerson

Length: 5 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

In The World According to Narnia, Jonathan Rogers takes you further into the imaginative world of C. S. Lewis, helping you to view our world in the way that Narnia invites you to view it. Rogers shows how the storylines and characters from Narnia sing with biblical truth.

The particular magic of the Chronicles of Narnia is their ability to awaken the reader to the imaginative possibilities that have been in the Gospel all along. It is through the imagination that Narnia stories do their work on you; you can hardly help but desire what is good and true. You can hardly help but feel that a life of virtue and adventure is something you don't want to miss. Whether you're new to the Chronicles or you've just finished The Last Battle, this book will expand your understanding and appreciation for C. S. Lewis' beloved classics.

©2005 Jonathan Rogers (P)2005 Blackstone Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"In an engaging style, Rogers simply and swiftly retells each story and highlights where the novels speak to the message of the Gospels....Those needing a travel guide to Lewis' world could do no better than this eminently readable combination of literary criticism and religious scholarship." (Booklist)
"Readers who feel they need a guide to the Christian symbols and metaphors in Lewis' Chronicles will appreciate the scriptural and theological connections in this earnest and accessible book." (Publishers Weekly)

Further up.

Any and everything Narnia. Explained parts I hadn’t caught the meaning of. The further in I go the more gratitude I feel for God who made the man; who convinced me to taste and see.

any qestions this book has. awsered

Wonderful great interesting esqued help full of great reference points between the chronicles and Bible

Excellent interpretation of the meaning of Narnia

This books opens up the reader for true insights into C. S. Lewis stories in the Land of Narnia. Lewis’s works are exquisite, but may at times need interpretation for the deeper meanings not to be lost on the readers. This is an excellent introduction to such integral meanings of his stories.

Further up, further in!

Overall The World According to Narnia is a good attempt to better understand CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Sorry the announcer’s voice was too irritating for me. Needed to have a talented audio engineer to bring his tonal range to more enjoyable levels.

Like tasting the fruit that each likes best himself...

I read this book after now being extremely well acquainted with the Narnia stories--having relatively memorized their many scenes through reading, and then listening the great story telling of the Focus on the Family audio performance (20-40 times each book). From this perspective, I found that Jonathan Rogers did a really wonderful job. It was a delight to see the stories, the characters, and the themes of each book inwoven through scripture, theology, and other of C.S. Lewis's writings. It was a truly masterful tapestry. I only wish I had set my eyes on the quote marks themselves rather than listening to them--but nonetheless, I believe I got a wide view of the whole tapestry while still appreciating the many colorful threads.
The best thing this book did for me was to draw up themes of human feelings through characters I already so deeply love, and then link those themes with those of scripture that I already hardily and boldly hold to...yet somehow did not make the connection to the human experience from the stories. I believe these examples will help not only my own storytelling and writing, but my compassion and usefulness in the church.

Wonderful.

For anyone who has read The Chronicles of Narnia, this is a must listen/read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Great discussion of Narnia

This provided an in-depth view of the themes and details of each Narnia story. While much of this I already understood, there was much I had missed too. I enjoyed this book immensely and I think all Lewis fans will enjoy it too. The information presented is more practical and more directly related than the cosmological theories ascribed to the series.

Opens eyes to Christian themes found in Narnia

A nice interweaving of the stories of Narnia with how the Christian faith is seen in Lewis' books. I will listen to it again.

Well done peek at the meaning behind the allegory.

This book was interesting, though not surprising in any way. I wanted to totally love it, as I certainly did the Chronicles, but it is not going to rise to that level. I longed for symbolism I had not figured out on my own, and found none. For that reason it was a tiny bit tedious.

An in-depth, book-by-book look into Narnia

I finished The Last Battle at 2:30am this morning and looked around for a good companion novel to follow up with to help me better understand the overall messages. Listening to this audiobook over the course of a day was the perfect way to end my time with The Chronicles of Narnia.

This book explores, obviously, the deeper Christian meaning behind the series and it's organized by publication order. I'd prefer if it were chronological like how I read it, but that's heresy to many fans though it does put Lewis in context with his thinking at the time of writing the series.

The author draws on numerous other texts by Lewis to support his research and I enjoy that the book seems to have had some personal resonance with the author himself. I haven't read any of Lewis's other writings, but I feel that their inclusion here is sufficient to my deeper understanding of his most important work.

I really like that each chapter is a retelling of the story and it's broken down in detail when it's appropriate. Because it took me a month or so to read through it all, I was thankful for these summaries and so that as I was busy about my day, I could enjoy hearing them and it was like a discussion, similar to a podcast, about historical and religious contexts.

There isn't much to say about this book other than I highly recommend it for it's accessibility, great writing style, and the narrator especially really drew me in an kept me engaged for the five-hour duration. I'm thankful that this resource exists to help me apply the messages in some way to my own life. I have never been religious in any way, but I thoroughly enjoyed the series and I can still take positive things from it.